In the Name of Identity Violence
and the Need to Belong

Amin Maalouf

published 1996, translated 2000

Amin Maalouf is a well known novelist and winner of France's
most prestigious literary award, the Goncourt Prize. He
grew up in Lebanon and moved to France
in 1976, at the age of 27. He sees himself as both Lebanese
and French. He celebrates our ability to maintain numerous
identities. He does not like the singular, tribal
identity of fanatics who are
"easily transformed into butchers." About fanatics
he writes that any doctrine with which they identify can
be perverted and murderous, including liberalism,
nationalism, religion, atheism and communism.

Maalouf describes no religion as completely void of intolerance.
He writes that he does not want merely to be tolerated,
he wants to be treated as "a
fully-fledged citizen" whatever his beliefs --
Christian or Jew where the majority is Muslim, or Muslim
where the majority is Christian or Jew.

He writes that traditions deserve respect only insofar as
they "respect the fundamental rights of men and women."
Of Islam he writes:

For me, history as a whole demonstrates that Islam
has immense potentialities for coexistence and fruitful
interaction with other cultures. But recent history shows
that regression is possible too, and that potentialities
could remain no more than potentials for a long while.

Maalouf's university study in France was sociology. He writes
that Christianity today is "what European societies
have made of it."

Maalouf says that identity does not become an issue until
it is threatened – for example French speakers in an
English speaking society (Canada perhaps).
Calming identity conflicts, he writes, "will mean making
people, especially minorities, feel included."

A personal note regarding identity and the negativism creating
it: I recall a third-generation Japanese at U.C. Berkeley
who was my companion back in the sixties. It would have
been better, I believe, if she had thought
of herself as just an American. A few bad experiences in
the years before I met her led her to embrace more firmly
her identity as Japanese.

Wikipedia describes Maalouf's novels as "marked
by his experiences of civil war and migration. Their characters
are itinerant voyagers between lands, languages, and religions."